Dr. Debra Shushan’s career has bridged the worlds of academia, policy, and advocacy — with a focus on Israel-Palestine and the broader Middle East, US foreign policy, foreign policies in non-democratic states, comparative political systems, and Jews in American politics.
Dr. Shushan started her career as an academic. She was a professor of Government at William and Mary and has also taught at Yale and Wesleyan Universities. Her first association with Georgetown was as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International and Regional Studies at GU’s campus in Qatar. Dr. Shushan’s research and language studies have taken her to much of the Middle East, including Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Syria, Turkey and the UAE, in addition to Israel and Palestine.
Seeking to leverage her expertise to impact US foreign policy, Dr. Shushan has worked for two Jewish organizations with missions to shift US policy toward achieving peace, security, self-determination, and human rights for Israelis and Palestinians alike. At J Street, Debra was Director of Government Affairs, leading the organization’s formidable lobbying team – known for punching above its weight on Capitol Hill. She later became J Street’s first-ever Director of Policy and stood up the J Street Policy Center as a source for trusted policy analysis and convenor of policy discussions among top experts. She was the organization’s top subject-matter expert, authoring “Shushan Street” columns and moderating Hill briefings and policy webinars. Before joining J Street, Debra was the Director of Policy and Government Relations at Americans for Peace Now.
Dr. Shushan graduated summa cum laude in Government from Harvard, where she was selected as a Truman Scholar. She attended Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, receiving an MPhil in International Relations. Dr. Shushan earned her PhD in Political Science at Yale. A foreign language aficionado, she speaks Hebrew, Arabic, and Spanish with varying degrees of success and has also studied Japanese.
Dr. Shushan is a frequent media commentator, having appeared on a range of outlets including BBC, France 24, Israel’s i24, Voice of America, and Al-Jazeera.